Juliet's Nurse (31 page)

“Fetch more spices.”

“Look to the baked meats.”

“Find dates and quinces from the pantry.”

Cocks crow, curfew bells ring. Three o’clock comes and goes, but Lord Cappelletto’ll not leave off ordering me about. Ordering me, and cook, and every servant in the house. Lady Cappelletta watches over him, muttering how nothing’s kept him up so late since the last of the pursemaker’s daughters was married off. He says she wears a jealous hood that unbecomes her. Such an unhappy house from which to send forth any bride. But this is the last day Juliet and I must abide beside such misery. I can hide one final time behind the hedgerow of their bickering. Slinking
to the woodpile that’s stacked where the dovecote stood, I lie down for a doze.

I’ve not slept long when the serving-man seeking logs awakens me. A perfect logger-head he is. But before I’ve run my tongue through half the ways of telling him what wooden fate I wish him, pipe and lute sound from the courtyard, and the house-page announces Paris is arrived.

I hurry to the courtyard, where Lord and Lady Cappelletti buzz about the count, who’s dressed in the same deep mourning for his cousin that they wear for Tybalt.

Paris looks past them, lays pinky finger beneath his eye, and nods smiling to me. He means to say my bruises are well-faded. I’d thought as much, peering at the polished plate set out in the sala, but his kind notice reassures me. Will not my Juliet do well, matched to such a man?

“Hie, Nurse, make haste,” Lord Cappelletto says. “Go wake Juliet. Trim her up, tell her the bridegroom’s come.”

One come, one gone, and she’s got the better of the bargain, the second so excels the first. It gives my tired legs strength to mount the stairs. As I cross the loggia I keep my sights on handsome Paris beaming eagerly below, as though he alone can draw joy into the Cappelletti courtyard.

“Why, lamb,” I call as I enter Juliet’s chamber. She’s got the bed curtains pulled as tight as on the coldest winter night. “Why, lady, why, love, sweetheart. Why, bride.”

My slug-a-bed’s sound in her sleep. Stealing every pennyworth of rest, and well she does, for Paris’ll give her none tonight. Will
give her all, I mean—so oft she’ll have no rest. Marry and amen to that, and may God forgive me, and her, for deceiving him.

This will be our last hour alone together, and I must make the most of it. Must find the words, the way, to tell her what she really is. What, and who, and how she came to be here, and why I’ve hid it all so long. This is the dowry I’ve got to give. Not coins or gowns or plate, but love. Love such as she’s only known from me, yet love she’s never known for what it truly is.

Such love surely is enough. I’ll rub her in it, like a scented oil. Wrap her with it, like the finest cloth. Adorn her with it, like jewels strung in that dark, thick hair that’s so like mine, and looped around her smooth young neck and dainty wrists. I’ll kiss it onto those almond eyes and tell about the day I first saw it in them. The bittersweet of losing Pietro, only to find him again in her.

I’ll tell it all in this precious hour. Our last hour alone. Yet not alone, for I feel Pietro with me. Feel there is in gallant Paris some echo of my own great-hearted husband. I’ll make her feel it as well, so she’ll know why I’m sure he’s meet match for her.

“Lady.” I draw back the bed curtain. “Lady, my lady.”

Juliet’s dressed. She must’ve been unnerved to wake alone. To rise so early and get herself into her clothes, only to falter and lie lonesome down again.

“What a bride you’ll be, already in your bed. Should I send the count to you directly?” That ought to rouse her. But still she sleeps.

I lay loving hand against her shoulder to shake her awake. Lay loving hand and feel her cold.

But no, it’s me who’s cold. An icy stone sunk to my stomach. A
freezing through my heart. For in that touch, I know. A bitter shivering jitters my joints, rattles the teeth in my head, makes me curse the day that I was born.

Born to live to find her dead.

Dead. Dead, dead, dead. My numbed lips form the word, over and over. A whisper, a roar, I cannot tell which. Until Lady Cappelletta comes in calling, “What noise is here? What’s the matter?”

What am I to say? My last child, my only life, is gone.

How can she die and leave me living?

Lady Cappelletta comes near the bed. She looks on Juliet and screams. So loud I grab my darling’s hand. And find clasped there an empty pouch, its loose drawstring tied off with a cross.

The numb, the cold, heats to searing pain. I hide the pouch within my own fat fist. Use that fist, and the other, to beat my head for being such a fool. A fool, and fooled.

Lord Cappelletto rushes in, then crumbles to his knees. “Death,” he says, his own face waxy as a funeral mask. “Death is my heir and steals everything from me. Tybalt stabbed, and Juliet taken with him, broken-hearted from grieving for her cousin.”

The musicians are still playing in the courtyard. Thrumming out their happy tune, not knowing bliss has turned to loss. My Juliet dead, never to know the last good act Tybalt tried to do, and how untrue her beloved Romeo. Me, not knowing as I should have, the instant death took her. Not knowing when I could, I should, have saved her.

My fist’s clenched fast, keeping clasped the awful truth. Between
the Cappelletti’s wails, I steal out of the bedchamber, through Ca’ Cappelletti and off to San Fermo, to find the man who killed her.

A scaffold rises inside the upper church, and some exalted painter barks down to his assistants. Another saint is being martyred on the wall. Barbara perhaps, or maybe Dorotea. Brushes dip into garish colors to depict the virgin’s torturous demise. As if those who come to pray do not have enough of death in our own lives, and need frescoed instruction in fresh grief.

I hurry past, down into the dank of the Franciscans’ cloister. There is the usual dismal press of sniveling children, shame-faced husbands, wretched wives, and crag-faced crones outside Friar Lorenzo’s cell. A lifetime of misery, seeking such relief as we’re told only the Holy Church can give.

Pushing my way through, I heave against the door. It gives way, revealing Friar Lorenzo bending his fervid ear to a blushing maiden like a worm wriggling into ripe fruit flesh.

“Benedicte, and God give you peace.” He smiles at me like I’m a child. “But you must have patience as well as penitence, Angelica, and wait your turn.”

“Damn your
benedicte
, and your God. And you.” I fling the empty poison-pouch at him.

Shock grays his face. But only for an instant, before he wills his features back to composed. “My dear Ginevra, you are absolved. Go forthwith to the church of San Zeno for the morning Mass.” In one swift motion, he ushers the maiden out, latches the door
against any other entries, and turns to hover over me. “Angelica, I did not—”

“Did not want what punishment you’d get, if it was learned you ministered an illicit marriage. So you hid the deed with poison.”

“No.” He snatches up the pouch and secrets it among his cache of medicinals. “Juliet came to me in ungodly anguish. She raised a blade to her own breast. I only gave her what would still her hand, as you stilled Romeo’s.”

“If only I’d stilled his heart along with his hand. But he lives, while my Juliet is dead.”

“Not dead, Angelica, though it’s comfort that you think so.”

What comfort, in seeing, touching, keening over her lifeless body? What good to him in denying she is killed?

Friar Lorenzo touches the tips of his fingers together, steepling his hands to lecture me. “What appears as death is not always death. No more than what appears as virtue always is true goodness. The remedy I dispensed has put her into a sleep so deep that she seems a corpse.”

It’s nearly more than my worn heart can believe. “She lives, truly?”

I make him swear to it, before Christ upon the cross. I want to trust his words, to let them melt away this tight hold of loss.

“But why?” I ask. “What could set her to such deception?”

“With her marriage to Romeo consummated, Juliet could not be married to the count, though all within Ca’ Cappelletti would force her to it. To save her from such sin, I deemed it best to let them think her lost. Once they’ve laid her within her family crypt,
I’ll send word to Romeo to bear her to Mantua, where they may live in secret joy.”

How could he, could she, have plotted to keep such a thing secret from me? “You’d’ve let me believe Juliet was dead, and bid her live far-off in Mantua without me knowing?”

“Did you not tell her to wed Paris, knowing she was already bound in the eyes of God to Romeo?”

This is why he turned my girl against me? I spit out what Romeo is, what he’s done. But Friar Lorenzo offers not even a flicker of surprise.

“You knew?” I’m still the fool, to need to ask. For what does he not know, sitting all day in this cold cell listening to what’s most intimately told?

“Romeo is not the only man in Verona who, courting what he could not get, would come to me for counsel. Such groans, such sighs, do I hear. But no more than that, concerning Rosaline—no sin done, none confessed. Her virtue was enough to save them both. When he turned his heart instead to Juliet, and found in hers a welcoming return, I only offered holy blessing to what they’d begun. Thus was Romeo saved from sin.”

“And Tybalt?”

“Romeo proclaimed a cousin’s love for Tybalt, but still Tybalt raised a sword at him. As Romeo tried to beat down the bandying, Tybalt struck Mercutio. Only then did Romeo, mad with grief, lift his own blade.” Friar Lorenzo pinches at his Pater Noster beads like a merchant plying abacus to calculate a profit. “God knows, I’d bring them both back if I could, and bind the families to peace as I
intended. But what death takes from us we can only have again in heaven.”

I’ve no need for him to tell me so, when everyone I’ve ever loved is lost to me.

Except Juliet.

If what he says is true. If my girl still lives. If for once I’m given hope instead of grief.

The deepest place within my chest aches. Just as it did when I swelled with milk, and all I sought was the sweet pain of her suck. Hope instead of grief.

But even such hope carries a sharp edge: this potion Friar Lorenzo’s given her must be some semblence of what he used to convince Pietro that our infant daughter was dead. Twice, he’s stolen her from me.

“Death did not take Susanna. You did.” The secret I’ve long kept spills from me—for what have I to lose in letting him know now all that I know? Why hide how much I loath him for all he’s put me through? “Because we were poor and could make no grand gifts to the Holy Church, you stole our living baby and gave her to the wealthy Cappelletti, letting them believe that theirs survived. Deceiving us into accepting that ours was dead.”

A hideous line throbs across his forehead, pulsing angry blue. “Who told you this, Angelica?”

Told. As though I must be ever told, the way a stupid beast must be shepherded. As though I’m no more than some dumb animal, and cannot figure for myself how I’ve been used.

“Sainted Maria.” I see her before me, bare-breasted and beatific
as she suckles the sacred babe. But in Friar Lorenzo’s narrow cell there’s no image of the Holy Mother. Only Christ, tortured upon the cross. “By the Sainted Maria, there are things only a mother knows.”

He gathers himself within the thick folds of his cassock, searching out words to convince me I am wrong. But I unlatch the door and take my leave of him.

Though the morning’s bright by the time I return from the friary, Lady Cappelletta’s gone to bed, having taken wine enough to slumber heavily. Lord Cappelletto sits alone with Juliet. Staring dull eyed, his voice so wearied I must bend close to make out what he says. “The earth has swallowed all my hopes but her. Left only this one poor thing to rejoice and solace in. But cruel death snatches even Juliet from us.”

By his
us
he means the Cappelletti. I once believed his losses measured as heavy as my own, and together we took comfort as we prayed for all those death stole away. But I’ll not find such fellowship with him today. He’s settled the Cappelletti cap once more upon Juliet’s head, and condoles himself by cataloguing how grand the funeral cortege will be. What he could not do for Tybalt, condemned as Count Mercutio’s killer, he’ll conjure instead for Juliet, heralded across Verona as Count Paris’s betrothed. A procession led by her godfathers Cansignorio and Il Benedicto. Entire religious orders burning candles for her soul. The prince’s council carrying the Cappelletti banner and shields. Finely decorated horses clad in the
family colors. And Paris walking shoulder to shoulder beside Lord Cappelletto, the carved bier before them, and atop it Juliet.